BOOK REVIEWS FROM A CURIOUS MIND: I read a lot. Books and the data/stories contained within them are my oldest friends. Working at the University of Houston allows me to use the M.D. Anderson Library. Awesome! My wife mentioned that I should write up short summaries/observations on the books I've been reading, since people might be interested in reading them, so I did. Comments are welcome.

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Monday, December 14, 2015

100 years ago a man wrote about the need for Noise Music! Amazing!

The
Art of Noise: Futurist Manifesto – Luigi Russolo (1913)

Noise.My favorite band is Sonic Youth.Once, while watching videos that I had taped on our family’s VHS
recorder, my dad came by and sat with me to see what I was getting into.I was around fourteen to fifteen years old at
the time.As soon as he sat down the
video for Teenage Riot began to play.This was, and is, my favorite song.The aural content perfectly matched the static in my brain.I rocked out to it while my dad sat there
silently.As soon as it finished, with
me exhausted from “rockin’ out,” my dad turned to me and said, “It’s just
noise.”I replied that yes, it was, and
it was my favorite noise.

I have always enjoyed dissonance in
music.I find white noise very soothing,
and have a noise machine that I run all night which helps me sleep like the
dead.I like repetitive noises, such as
those of motors or machinery, and I find odd rhythms within those noises.To this day, “normal,” tuneful,
pleasing-to-the-ear songs and music leave me cold.I prefer my music with a jagged edge I
guess.

While studying Art History I read a
lot about the Futurist movement and heard mention of a manifesto titled The Art
of Noise.I knew of the weird band that
shared that name and once I read this work it made perfect sense why they
called themselves The Art of Noise.In
1913 the world had been in the thick what is now called the Industrial
Revolution, as well as nearing ever closer to the War to End All Wars (WWI)
which began a year later.Philosophers
and artists, as usual, were at the forefront of everything, and could sense
that the worlds that the Arts had drawn from, the seemingly simple world of
Nature and God and the Natural Order, had been bypassed by us humans.We were now remaking the world.The simple definitions which once held saw
over the art world and the music world no longer seemed relevant.They would seem even less relevant after the
ensuing decades of war, strife, and horror that culminated with the United
States dropping the two biggest bombs ever used in war on Japan.The Futurists were artists and musicians that
sought to explore this new world through new art and new methods of creating
art.

Sensing all of this, Luigi Russolo
wrote a letter to his friend, a Futurist composer and musician named Francesco
Balilla Pratella.This letter is what
has come to be known as the manifesto The Art of Noise.In it, Russolo describes how the development
of our society has created a whole new wealth of sounds, sounds that are
normally categorized as “noise,” and that the human ear has evolved to accept
and enjoy these sounds.He describes the
development of music itself, from pleasing, naturally occurring sounds, to
sounds created by humans purely for other human’s pleasure, to the utilization
of this powerful new media by the religions of the world to somehow contain and
take advantage of the power of the music to transport the mind to a different
state of consciousness.From there he
describes how the formal rigidity of the Greek musical system did not allow for
harmonies, leading to the harmony-less church chanting and music of the Middle
Ages.From there it was a matter of
adding layers of complexity and invention to reach the musical heights of the
masters like Bach or Beethoven.

Even in 1913 Bach and Beethoven were
considered by many to be old-fashioned music.Russolo talks about how the human ear, having grown accustomed to the
atonal, dissonant, and polyrhythmic nature of the sounds coming from the
industrial machinery, increasingly found the old music to be aurally
boring.Even the classical composers who
tried to inject the sounds of dissonance into their music could only go so far,
having based their music on the normal tonal range expected by the instruments
of an Orchestra.Because of this,
Russolo proposed to create new instruments which could convey the sounds/noises
that were now integral to the human experience.He saw the following categories as the “six families of noise:”

He sent this manifesto to his musician
friend so he could use the ideas within to create a new music.It is odd to think that his words essentially
predicted the state of the most avant-garde of music since his time.Between the sonically harsh works of masters
like Schoenberg in the classical arena, the twisted and atonal Free Jazz of
Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, the drone-driven and atonal rock music of the
Velvet Underground, the roaring avant-noise-rock ofSonic Youth and Suicide, the walls of 30
minute slow drones and skronk from bands like Earth and Sunn-O, the furious and
near-incomprehensible noise of bands like the Locust, and the mad, erratic
glitch EDM of the past ten years or so, it seems that Russolo was right on the
money.The “normal” sounds of the
typical music of the past sounds so quaint to modern ears.It can still move the soul but it does not
feel urgent or currently important.Our ears
continue to evolve and our sense of what is pleasurable grows and grows.I am so glad I ran across this manifesto as
it sheds light on the music I love, why I love it, and where it may be headed
in the future.Long live the Noise!

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